How to Make Great Cocktails

Late afternoon. Cocktail hour. Whiskey-tinted light canting in through windows. Dust motes. The whole bit. You could have a beer. But that’s just taking something out of the fridge. Have you ever been impressed by a person who took something out of the fridge? Maybe if the something was a cheesecake. And the person was a dog.

No. You’re going to have a cocktail, because our ancestors invented cocktail hour to give much-needed structure to what is otherwise an inconsiderate march of unregulated, haphazard moments. Friend in from out of town? Make a set of sidecars in a punch bowl. Layoffs at work? Make a stiff martini that you can stir yogi-like until your thoughts dissolve into vague wisps of horror and indignation.

“Then you can say, Here’s a maple-bourbon old-fashioned, and people will be like, ‘Ooooh!’"

I’m not saying you should structure your life around cocktails, or that you have to drink martinis. This isn’t the 1920s. All I’m saying is it feels good to be the kind of person who can create order out of pandemonium—who can calculate precisely the amount of alcohol, or sweetness, or bitterness a moment demands. People revere a person who can do this. They can focus on arranging their own precarious sanity into a shape appropriate for public consumption because you are taking care of the drinks. How do you think bartenders came to be the heroes of movies?

People will start to ask you to do it. What can I make with all this? they’ll ask, spreading their hands. And you’ll go in and take their pieces and compose something beautiful. You will create a scaffold around which the next several hours can wrap themselves like a clematis vine. And then you’ll do whatever comes next. I trust you’ll know what that is.

How to Make an Old-Fashioned

Old-Fashioned

John Burgoyne

1. Start by dousing a sugar cube in two to three dashes of Angostura bitters.

2. Add two ounces of rye or bourbon, or even aged rum or mezcal. (Mezcal is fun. Try the mezcal.)

3. Toss in one or two large ice cubes and stir 20 to 30 times with a bar spoon to dilute.

4. Garnish with an orange slice, or shear off a nickel-size circle of orange peel and squeeze it, peel-side out, in the direction of a match held over the drink.

Your First Three Cocktails

Just as French chefs consider the omelet the ultimate test of cooking, many bartenders don’t trust a newbie who can’t make a daiquiri.

Dolly Faibyshev

Bartenders learn to make drinks the same way chefs learn to cook—one recipe at a time. Are there general principles? Sure. But those will emerge the more cocktails you make. “If you pick up a decent cocktail book, you’ll eventually be like, wait, that recipe looks exactly like this one. And it is, just with different ingredients,” says Kimber Weissert, bartender and bar manager at Pittsburgh’s Butcher and the Rye.

For now, start with the basics.

1. The Martini (2 oz, 1 oz, 2 dashes)

“I think the first drink a person should make should be a manhattan or a martini. In reality, they are the same recipe,” says Weissert. “A manhattan is two ounces bourbon or rye, one ounce sweet vermouth, and two dashes of Angostura bitters. A martini is two ounces vodka or gin, one ounce dry vermouth, and, classically, two dashes of orange bitters.”

2. The Daiquiri (2 oz, ¾ oz, ¾ oz)

“A daiquiri is a beautiful cocktail, and it’s another one that you can turn into other cocktails just by changing out the ingredients. It’s two ounces of rum, ¾ ounce simple syrup, and ¾ ounce lime juice. It’s what’s called a sour recipe, which is gonna be a base spirit, some kind of citrus, and some kind of sweetener. Just change the rum to whiskey, the limes to lemons, and throw in some egg white and you have a classic whiskey sour.”

3. The Old-Fashioned (2 oz, 1 tsp, 2 dashes)

“Old-fashioneds are a great way to impress people because they’re so easy to manipulate. I tell guests: Go home, get any bottle of whiskey, rum, Old Tom gin, whatever. Add a teaspoon of maple syrup and then a couple dashes of bitters,” says Alejandro De La Parra, bar manager at the Teardrop Lounge in Portland, Oregon. “Then you can say, Here’s a maple-bourbon old-fashioned, and people will be like, ‘Ooooh!’ ”

The Bartender's Bookshelf

Amazon

Come Here Often?A compilation of excellent writing about bars, this book includes dives, music joints, and even a bar in Antarctica. Read it while you have whatever you’re having.

Drink Like a Man: The closest thing to a modern classic, by Ross McCammon and David Wondrich, this will set you straight on old-school drinks and the tastiest ways to riff on them. Also: It contains plenty of booze history for lording over people at parties.

The Flavor Bible: Not a drinks book, per se, but very handy for determining which flavors go with which. “If you try something and you like it, it’s a cocktail,” says Weissert. “Cocktails come from somewhere, you know?”

The Equipment

Dolly Faibyshev

Rabbit Mojito Muddler: Do you need a muddler? Not if you can smash fruit with the butt end of a butter knife. Will you want a muddler after trying to smash fruit with the butt end of a butter knife? Yes.

Koriko Hawthrone Strainer (Made by Cocktail Kingdom): Place over the top of your shaking tin, press the spring forward into the lip, and pour. If you press hard enough, you can separate your pour into two streams and pour two drinks at once, which is cool.

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